Virtuelle Welten in der Fernlehre – Eine Studie der Fernhochschule AKAD University

The Corona pandemic changed the world of higher education teaching in many ways. Video conferencing solutions commonly used in the wake of the restrictions proved to be a good substitute for some topics while increasing local flexibility. However, it also became apparent that there are teaching formats that are not ideally implementable via videoconferencing. These include seminars with a strong focus on group work or course content that requires a lot of assistance from the instructor. Virtual worlds are identified as a potentially better alternative to video conferencing in these cases due to their social and spatial presence. Two seminars are identified as particularly problematic at the institution, a German distance learning university, namely a programming seminar and a business simulation. For this purpose, a prototypical solution using the virtual world of TriCAT spaces is exploratively designed, implemented, and evaluated. We present how these two seminars can be successfully ported to a virtual world. The evaluation of the sample (N = 23) shows that although the implementation in 3D is only slightly superior to the same seminar in Zoom in terms of flow experience, most prefer the 3D variant. In observing the 3D seminars, we identify opportunities for improvement for subsequent prototypes and lay the groundwork for more in-depth research.